


let me see you wave your hand up in the air

by megyal



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-09
Updated: 2007-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-28 09:35:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megyal/pseuds/megyal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for wrong_maps@livejournal. Play the videos, if you can, before you read each section. The videos and pictures do not belong to me.</p>
    </blockquote>





	let me see you wave your hand up in the air

**Author's Note:**

> Written for wrong_maps@livejournal. Play the videos, if you can, before you read each section. The videos and pictures do not belong to me.

[vid 1](http://www.youtube.com/v/Xs2wmEwkplg)

The thing about soca music was that the base-line was so fucking _heavy_ , Patrick thought faintly as he panted in the hot sunshine. He was probably as red as a beet and he felt as if his heart was being seized by the music playing around them, twisted out of control in his chest. The road that he and Pete were standing along was filled from side to side with scantily-clad people, feathers and sequins flashing as they jumped in the street.

Pete was jumping as well beside him, flailing excitedly, dressed in loose shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt to fend off the blistering heat of the day. Patrick had forgone the tourist look for jeans and was kind of regretting this procedure; back at the hotel, he had been thinking he would have been too embarrassed to bare too much skin but there were people here who were about four times as large and six times underdressed.

A local policeman walked past, eyeing them from underneath his smart cap, even as one of the big music-trucks rolled past slowly, followed by the usual mass of dancers, dressed in their band-costumes. When the truck went on ahead, the policeman walked back to them, his dark face totally devoid of sweat. Patrick wondered if he had a fan somewhere underneath his hat.

"Everything alright?" The policeman bellowed, his accent strong but his words were understandable. There had been quite a few times though, since they had landed in the [Norman Manley International Airport](http://pics.livejournal.com/megyal/pic/0001bbwq/) and had been driven to the [Pegasus Hotel](http://pics.livejournal.com/megyal/pic/0001a3w2/), that Patrick had had to say "What? What did you say?", because Jamaicans spoke so _fast_ , but he had gotten used to it (good ears), and some people politely slowed down to accommodate him; Pete, in the meanwhile, was still tickled by the fact that his middle name and the capital city they were staying in were one and the same.

"Yeah, we're cool," Patrick shouted back and the policeman inclined his head, slanting his eyes at Pete, who was cackling as he filmed. Patrick tried to look very sane to balance Pete out, but the policeman simply nodded and sauntered along.

Patrick fanned himself with one hand and a bottle of water was thrust into his damp grip.

"You alright?" A writhing girl yelled at him. She was wearing this tall headdress, purple and feathery; Patrick wondered why Jamaicans always asked him that. _Pete_ didn’t get asked that, at all. Maybe he looked shockingly pale and out of place, but he doubted it; apparently, they asked each other that all the time. "Come on, man! Dance, nuh!" _Nuh_. That was one word he heard a lot, flung along the street and he had _no_ idea what it meant.

"Go dance!" Pete yelled, swinging the camera in Patrick's direction; Patrick automatically flung up his arm. "Dance!"

"Whine!" The girl crowed. A bunch of other young women, obviously her friends, maybe students from one of the universities, had stopped to gyrate in the road, because the truck itself had come to a pause a little way ahead. "Whine, white-boy! Whine!"

"WHAT?" Patrick screamed even as he was pulled into the middle of the hot hot road, surrounded by these girls. It was like a video-shoot, only four hundred times as humid; he hung onto his hat with one hand, desperately, even as the girls lined up so he was in the middle of the line, bracketed before and behind by general half-nakedness. " _Whine_?!"

"Yeah, lemme show you," his kidnapper, the one in front, laughed and then proceeded to gyrate against him, bumping her behind against his crotch. "Dance. Go crazy. _Whine_."

Go crazy. Patrick cast a pleading look in Pete's direction, but Pete simply made a _carry-on_ movement with his left hand, squinting into the camera. Patrick made a mental note to kill him later and hide his body underneath the hotel bed. When he had agreed to come to the Carnival in Kingston with Pete, there had been _nothing_ in the contract about going crazy. He had made sure about that. He should have stayed on the North Coast with Andy and Joe. Right now, instead of being mauled by shrieking girls, he could have been lying under some palm tree on beaches of white sand, the sound of the waves lulling him to sleep. He could have been mauled by shrieking girls at a _concert_ on his own time, instead of on this quick vacation, for crying out loud.

He let out a sigh and then rocked his hips to the rhythm of the music; he had always had a good sense of The Beat, and the girls yelled in delight and walked forward, all of them in this crazy conga-line; Patrick held onto the hips of the girl in front, smiling a little, the water-bottle releasing cool droplets against his palm. They stopped again and was that the leg of the girl behind him coming up to rest on his hip? Wow. It was insane.

The truck was moving ahead again, the deejay on it yelling back at the crowd to _get on bad_ and _misbehave_. The revellers seemed to have no problems with that exhortation and the members of his little line stopped and moved their shoulders and legs wildly; Patrick didn't even try to keep up. They released him, laughing as he escaped back to Pete, jumping back and forth and dancing against each other as Patrick pulled the bottle of water the girl had given to him and took a long swig of it.

Go crazy. Living with a dude like Pete, that was an everyday thing.

***

[vid 2](http://www.youtube.com/v/RGKknWBAmXQ)

"Whoa," Pete said, peering at the view-screen of the camera. "Somewhere in America, a feminist is having an aneurism."

Patrick stared at the woman performing onstage. They had marched with the crowd to the Mas Camp, filed into the open-air venue and now a Trinidadian singer named Destra was dancing and singing; her voice was wonderfully clear despite her gyrations and Patrick found himself impressed. People were ardently waving Caribbean flags near them and he wondered what they would think if he waved the US one as well.

 _Let's go dancing. Let's go whining. What you waiting for?_ Destra turned and thrust her pelvis. Patrick smiled wryly at the thought of himself doing that onstage.

People were pushing and dancing, casting them curious looks as he stood with Pete in the middle of the crowd. Pete was shuffling a bit to the music; Patrick was doing a better job of keeping the beat, but still. They were nowhere hear the wild abandon of the crowd.

"Dude, my head," he said as quietly as he could, considering the circumstances, and Pete's eyes slid to him without moving his own head. "I. Can we go?"

"Too much fun?" Pete grinned, but he switched off the camera and gave it to Patrick to stick in his pocket. Sliding past people, they made their way to the large parking lot, where a lot of people were outside chattering. Taxi-men yelled at them as they made it to the main sidewalk, but the Pegasus was just a five-minute walk away; men were roasting chicken in steel drums, cut longitudinally and set on metal stands as makeshift barbecue grills and people were buying a quarter- or half-a-chicken deposited in foil, with thick slices of white bread on the side.

"So," Pete said as they finally got up into their room, going over to open the curtains and peer down at the lights of the nearby park and the rest of the city. It was so quiet, a marked difference from the intense lights and sounds of Mas Camp. "What do you think?"

"Different," Patrick sighed, sitting on the cool bed and toeing off his sneakers; he promised himself that for the rest of this holiday, he'd be going around in sandals.

Pete sat beside him, his tattoos curling dark in the low light. He'd gotten a lot of stares for those and had preened shamelessly.

"It's a homophobic country, you know," Pete said quietly. "Which is sad. Because I don't get to do this in public." He leaned over and pressed a long kiss at the corner of Patrick's mouth, the edge of his smile.

"We don't do that in public _anywhere_ , Pete," Patrick chided, but he understood. The enthusiastic, hot beauty of the island was offset by this dark fact. It _was_ kinda sad.

"Nowhere is perfect, anyway," Pete concluded in that offhand, dismissive way of his, leaving Patrick to his own thoughts as he got up to stroll to the bathroom. "We really need to teach Andy and Joe how to _whine_ , though." His nasal laughter wafted through the closing bathroom door.

"And go crazy," Patrick said to himself, shaking his head and grinning a little.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Nuh_ : It's just the Jamaican way of saying 'no?', but it's a little weird, placed indiscriminately at the end of forceful requests. It's like saying, 'go on, then!' So, if you want your child to eat his vegetables, you say "Eat them, nuh!" and it's like "Eat it, come on!"  
> ♠ Jamaicans tend to classify everyone by race and colour. White-boy, indian-gyal. It's not so much prejudice as it is a way of life.  
> ♠ Homophobia is rampant, which is enraging and confusing; I like living here, but. Yeah.  
> ♠ The Pegasus Hotel picture taken from [here](http://www.hotelplanner.com/Hotels/3873-2436-lex/Reservations-The-Jamaica-Pegasus-Hotel.html); Norman Manley International Airport taken from [here](http://almaten.info/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4704).


End file.
